As jokes go, it was as prophetic as it gets.

In April 2014, Andrew Dreyfus, then the head of Blue Cross Blue Shield, was cohosting the roasting and toasting of Dr. Ralph de la Torre, the president and CEO of Steward Health Care, at a glittery fundraiser for the Whittier Street Health Center. Using mock graphics of this newspaper, Dreyfus envisioned de la Torre as owner, publisher, and editor of “The Boston de la Globe,’’ a platform that would empower him to generate adoring news about himself on pages eerily projected for publication in January and February of this year.

Today, de la Torre does dominate the Globe, although the coverage is far from flattering. The playful jibes at the roast — targeted at de la Torre’s ego, ambition, and acquisitions of wealth — are now juxtaposed against the financial collapse of a for-profit hospital network that was supposedly committed to providing affordable, accessible health care to the neediest. And with that, today’s roasting of de la Torre is for real.

“In the past I had a friendship with this guy. I had a respect and a friendship,’’ Jack Connors — a philanthropist and retired health care and advertising executive who cohosted the roast with Dreyfus — told me. “Neither of those exist anymore. It’s unbecoming to make money over the bodies of 16,000 employees. And it’s unacceptable.’’

That’s a powerful condemnation of de la Torre. Still, it’s worth looking back at that 2014 event, which was preserved on YouTube, because it shows exactly how de la Torre got to where he is today — in the loving embrace of Boston’s business elite.

His springboard to that admiring crowd was the job he landed in 2008 as president and CEO of Caritas Christi Health Care, the hospital network affiliated with the Archdiocese of Boston — and he got that through Connors, chairman emeritus of what was then Partners HealthCare and is now Mass General Brigham. As Connors told the story at that 2014 fundraiser, at the request of a friend, he met with de la Torre, a brilliant cardiac surgeon who asked about the possibility of running a Partners hospital.

There were no openings, so Connors said he called the CFO of the Archdiocese of Boston to ask how the Caritas CEO search was going. Told there were three finalists, Connors said he replied, “No, you don’t, you have four finalists.’’ Two weeks later, de la Torre was CEO of Caritas. “All you do is open the door a little bit, he blows through it and blows us all away,’’ Connors said in his remarks that night.

Remember, the roast took place four years after de la Torre engineered the 2010 sale of Caritas to Steward, a holding company for a private equity firm. In other words, the Boston business world embraced not just de la Torre but also the for-profit health care model that he bought into at great risk, it turns out, to the vulnerable populations served by Steward hospitals. The chain is currently losing millions of dollars, putting some of the 33 hospitals it owns, including nine in Massachusetts, in danger of closing.

But no one at the roast spoke about the risk of trying to make a profit on health care for low-income and elderly populations, only about the glory of de la Torre’s vision. Dreyfus proposed a toast to “a visionary, a leader, and soon, no doubt, to be my boss,’’ a reference to his joking prediction of de la Torre’s dominance of the Globe and the health care world.

“Ralph de la Torre is a visionary, with no concept of fear,’’ said roaster Mark DiNapoli, a Suffolk Construction executive at the time, who was standing in for his boss, John Fish. Providing another glimpse into the business community’s embrace of de la Torre, DiNapoli also told the crowd how Suffolk Construction, which is known for commercial building, renovated a house that de la Torre had purchased on the Cape — a “very grand turn-of-the-century summer home ... majestically set on the water.’’

Dreyfus, the former Blue Cross Blue Shield leader, told WBUR that he still believes de la Torre deserves credit for helping to preserve some Massachusetts community hospitals. “I think now we just have to say, ‘Well, we still have these important community resources, these important hospitals out there and how can we stabilize them,’ ’’ Dreyfus said in the WBUR interview. In an email response to my question about his predictions about de la Torre’s dominance of the Globe, Dreyfus said, “it’s ironic that at least his notoriety became true.’’

As for Connors, he told me that when he supported de la Torre, “he was a visionary, but he became something different. I think I was right to respect him when I did and I think I’m right to not respect him now,’’ Connors said.

Meanwhile, talk about prophetic.

On that night in April 2014, each roaster gave de la Torre, a boat lover who now owns a $40 million yacht, a gag gift with a maritime theme. DiNapoli gave him a spyglass as “a symbol of his far-sighted vision and very strong leadership.’’ Dreyfus gave him a foghorn, “in case your staff can’t hear or understand you.’’

The joke gift from Connors? A life vest.

Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at joan.vennochi@globe.com. Follow her @joan_vennochi.